Challenging the displacement of colonial histories? Isolated memories of colonial deportations from Libya to Italy in Europe’s ‘periphery’

Colonialism has largely been erased from Europe’s collective narrative of a shared past, despite its significant relevance to the (postcolonial) present. The continuum between colonialism and the present is not necessarily evident and accessible in the world we inhabit. Often, the colonial past is displaced and unarticulated in contemporary contexts, which makes it difficult to grasp its impact on present-day realities. Memory practices that engage with the colonial past can play a crucial role in exposing and challenging the inarticulation of the colonial past in the present time. This article investigates the potential of memory work to reveal the (forced) disconnection between the colonial past and the postcolonial present by exploring practices of remembrance (and oblivion) related to colonial deportations from Libya to Italy, a peculiar segment of Europe’s colonial history. Following Italy’s invasion of what is now Libya in 1911, thousands of individuals were deported to the metropole, with most sent to penal colonies on the southern Italian islands of Ustica, Favignana, Ponza, and the Tremiti archipelago. Today, these islands are among the very few sites in Italy where the country’s colonial past is somehow recognized and remembered through a series of monuments and plaques commemorating Libyan deportees. While these artefacts partially reflect colonial amnesia and Eurocentric dynamics, they also highlight the grievability of Libyan deportees’ lives. In doing so, they raise pressing and uncomfortable questions about Europe’s present, particularly in relation to the securitization of its migration policies. The peripheral position of local memory work on colonial deportations limits its capacity to challenge Italian and European colonial amnesia. However, this memory work is also the product of transnational encounters between local and Libyan actors in the Mediterranean space, making the islands transnational sites of memory that transcend centre-periphery dynamics.